Don’t worry about people stealing your design ideas. Worry about the day they stop.

Mobile is today’s first screen. So design responsively, focusing on content and structure first.

Websites and apps alike should remove distractions and let people interact as directly as possible with content.

90 percent of design is typography. And the other 90 percent is whitespace.

Boost usability and pleasure with progressive disclosure: menus and functions that appear only when needed.

One illustration or original photo beats 100 stock images.

Design your system to serve your content, not the other way around.

Remove each detail from your design until it breaks.

Style is the servant of brand and content. Style without purpose is noise.

Nobody waits. Speed is to today’s design what ornament was to yesterday’s.

Don’t design to prove you’re clever. Design to make the user think she is.

Project management is like sweeping up after the elephants, only less glamorous.

Don’t worry about people stealing your design. Worry about the day they stop.

Design is a verb: Redefining Dictionary.com.

In 2006, Lexico Publishing Group, creators of Dictionary.com (the most-visited online dictionary) and Thesaurus.com (the most-visited online thesaurus), tapped us to redesign their popular reference network.

God is in the design details. A screenshot of what we delivered in 2006.

By coming first and being best, the network had earned a huge following. But after more than a decade online, Lexico’s brand identity and site structure had begun to lose focus—and the company was losing market share to younger competitors.

Problems of long-running successful sites

Lexico’s problems were typical of large, long-running web content properties that have grown in an organic (but also somewhat haphazard) manner, year after fast-paced year.

Its advertising acceptance policy had become loose and somewhat vague. This in turn created inconsistent column widths from one page to the next, causing visitors to wonder if they were still on the same network of sites. URL redirects did little to reassure new users that they had come to the place they intended. Subtle, unconsidered differences between network logos further lessened the sense of brand cohesion. Although it was doing many things right, Lexico needed help.

A brand refresh, before and after. Small changes make a big difference.

First restructure, then redesign

We reorganized the multi-site network’s URL structure so that first-time users would feel safe and the connection between sites would be clear. Analyzing the multiple sites’ numerous capabilities from the point of view of users, we were able to surface features that had always been present but were rarely used because nobody knew about them.

We brought a new level of uniformity to advertising and page layouts. To the extent that we could do so, we also brought hierarchy and coherence to page typography—a critical improvement, given that Dictionary.com and its siblings are text-driven applications. We freshened and tightened the brand identifiers, too, making site logos work better as a group, while changing as little else as possible.

Next, we updated the color scheme and deepened its logic to make the related sites feel more like a family, again keeping change to a bare minimum. We then replaced the site’s aging markup with clean semantic structures styled via smart CSS.

The benefits of good design

After our redesign, Dictionary.com and its sister sites delivered a smoother, smarter, more consistent user experience. Customer feedback—even from long-term users, who typically dislike change—was overwhelmingly positive. Shoring up the loyalty of existing users was the first step toward growing market share. It also caught the attention of investors and buyers.

Six months after we redesigned dictionary.com, the company sold for roughly three hundred times our fee—proof that design is not an expense, it’s an investment.

Two years later, the purchaser redesigned the site again. The present Dictionary.com does not reflect our work, but you can visit the archival site to get a notion of what we created. (Modern elements of the site, designed subsequent to our work, get pulled into the archival site, creating an experience that is not what we designed, exactly, but is as close as one can come to it today.)